Were two Palestinian teenagers shot to death in cold blood by Israeli soldiers on May 15, nakba day?

Palestinians say that video evidence shows that two youths were shot far from any action, when they were not threatening soldiers or Border Patrol officers in any way. This is in effect an accusation of murder.

While we don’t know (yet) for certain what did happen, it seems clear that the Israelis that were accused of shooting them did not do so — and most likely they were not shot with an Israeli military weapon.

There are two videos in question. One is taken by security cameras at a nearby business, and another was taken by a Palestinian cameraman working for CNN, Kareem Khadder.

Nadeem Nouwareh

The security camera footage shows two Palestinians falling to the ground (about 73 minutes apart). It does not show their faces. The first one is Nadeem Nouwareh (also called Nadeem Abu Qaraa in some reports).

Nouwareh, who is supposed to have been hit in the chest, falls forward and puts his hands out to break his fall. Experts say that this is unlikely, that someone hit in the chest with a high-powered bullet will normally be pushed back by the force of the bullet.

The Khadder video shows a nearby Israeli position. The camera shows one of the Border Patrol officers firing and then quickly pans to the location of the Palestinians, where they are seen rushing to pick someone up and put him in an ambulance. It does not show either of the two being hit.

The weapon used by the Border Patrol officer has a rubber-bullet cassette clearly visible on the barrel. The cassette holds the rubber bullets, which are propelled by firing blanks from the rifle’s normal magazine.

While it is possible to fire live ammunition with the cassette in place, the sound of the shot is quite different, and would have been noticed by everyone at the post. Unless there was a conspiracy including all the Israelis present, this did not happen.

CNN’s broadcast includes an interview with Nouwareh’s father, who displays a bullet he says was found in Nadeem’s backpack after it passed through his body.

The spent bullet that is displayed looks like a 5.56 mm bullet of the type that is used by Israel (and also by the weapons supplied to the Palestinian security forces by the US). Bullets like this can be picked up at firing ranges around the country.

The bullet, which supposedly penetrated Nouwareh’s chest, exited his back, and then was stopped by a hard object (like a book) in the backpack, is only slightly deformed. An expert interviewed by Israel’s Channel 2 — and another that I spoke to — both said that it was certain that under these circumstances it would have been crushed almost flat.

The backpack has a small hole and a small bloodstain on it. Inside, the father displays a book that appears to have a red substance wiped across it. I can’t see how the bullet would have carried that much blood inside, or why it would be smeared across the page.

Mohammad Odeh Salameh

The second victim is Mohammad Odeh Salameh (initial reports gave his name as Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh Abu Daher), said to be hit in the back with the bullet exiting his chest. In the poor quality security video, he appears to be hit, falls to his knees, and then rolls over. The CNN broadcast shows a still picture of him on the ground, apparently after the shooting, taken by Palestinian photographer Atef Safadi. Here is a screen capture from about 2:48 into the broadcast:

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman rebuked the U.S. and Europe after their calls for a “thorough” investigation of the deaths of two Palestinian Authority Arabs in Nakba Day riots last week.

The two Arab teens were killed on May 15, allegedly by IDF soldiers, during violence outside the Ofer Prison, located next to the PA capital of Ramallah in Samaria.

“”We don’t need an American request to investigate the subject,” Liberman told reporters Wednesday while visiting Samaria’s Ariel University. “I reject any request and the hypocrisy we see worldwide.”

U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki called for a “prompt and transparent” investigation in response to a reporter’s question during a briefing on Capitol Hill.

European Union missions in the Palestinian Authority capital of Ramallah and in Jerusalem made similar statements. “We reiterate the need for security forces, whether Israeli or Palestinian, to refrain from the use of lethal force, except in cases where there is a real and imminent threat to life,” they said.

In response, Liberman pointed out that the Israeli army is the “most moral” military force in the world.

“I am saddened these demands don’t come up in other cases,” he commented. “In Syria around 170,000 people have been killed and I didn’t see any act or request from the international community to investigate those murders. Hamas executed two men in Gaza after accusing them of spying for Israel, both without a lawyer or fair trial. I didn’t see any request to investigate that [either],” he added.

As Liberman has pointed out, the video footage that has made the rounds was posted after several days and may have been edited, as such videos often are. Leftists groups with an agenda hoping to incriminate Israel often show only part of an incident, or judiciously edit the footage to falsify the information altogether, as in the Al Dura case.

At the end of the day, regardless of the outcome, one must ask the question:

Why were these two young men there in the first place, during a violent Nakba Day riot at Ofer Prison?

Based on content from: IDF Blog.

Yesterday, following an illegal attempt by Palestinian Authority Arabs and foreign activists to erect an illegal outpost in Samaria’s Hemdat area, in the northern Jordan Valley, security personnel responded to the site with the intent to implement a standing Supreme Court decision.

At the site, Arabs and foreign activists violently responded, throwing stones and striking Israeli security forces. The security personnel contained the violence with riot dispersal means, seized the tents and detained three Palestinian Authority Arabs who were the main instigators.

Reports that foreign diplomats abused their diplomatic privileges are currently being reviewed and, if required, complaints will be filed with the relevant authorities.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Paul Hirschson, said a formal complaint might be filed with the French over the involvement of French diplomat, Marion Castaing. “If she did participate then a formal complaint will be filed because that is not the way diplomats behave,” he said.

This is what is being shown in the mainstream media: French diplomat Marion Castaing on the floor, with some media outlets questioning about the guns supposedly pointed at her by an Israeli police officer.

But this picture is being shown out of context, and the status of the gun supposedly pointed at her, purposefully misrepresented.

This is what the media fails to show:

The photo used to spread this misinformation was taken as a screenshot from a video with footage clearly showing that Marion Castaing was neither physically dragged to the floor nor had guns pointed at her. Also, the photo clearly shows that the officer is holding his gun by the magazine, nowhere near the rifle’s grip.

Many photos and videos have been manipulated to show Israel in a negative light. This is just another example of the length to which people will go to spread lies as part of the propaganda war against Israel.

Below is the edited “news” report, as reported by Iran’s state controlled TV.

In recent years there have been too many reports of Arab terror attacks and riots instigated/directed/inspired by journalists.  They get paid to show action, and the Arabs love to cooperate.  Having an audience well equipped with cameras to record Israeli citizens and IDF soldiers injured and cowering is great encouragement for them.

algemeiner.com recently published a video which shows how this is done.

This reminds me of a BBC Radio report I heard over twenty years ago, when the Intifada was a new Arab term for attacking Jews.   I don’t number them since I’ve never heard of an official end.  It comes and goes in waves but never totally stops.  In that report, the radio journalist made it clear that he was crouched together with the attacking Arabs as they threw rocks and bricks at Israelis. You could hear the noises and his uncontrolled excitement. The IDF began responding with teargas, and the journalist told us how the Arabs had come equipped with cloths and remedies to protect their eyes and lungs from it.  He very emotionally described how parents comforted their children and covered their eyes to protect them.  It was 100 precent clear that the journalist was totally identified with the Arab attackers and considered this a great adventure for himself.

Unfortunately, not only foreign journalists identify with the Arabs who attack Israel, so do Israeli journalists, politicians and academics. They consider themselves “post-Zionists.”  But to tell you the truth, there has always been Zionist, mostly Left-Labor who considered it important to give the Arabs their own country next to the State of Israel, even before the establishment of the state.  It’s not enough that the British imported the Hashemites and gave them Transjordan to rule, but the United Nations Partition Plan, approved by David Ben-Gurion’s followers, allocated most of what was left of the British Mandate of Palestine to the Arabs.

The World expected the Arabs to defeat us in 1948 and at best we’d be governed by a continuation of the Mandate.  Luckily God had other plans.

There’s nothing new in journalists trying to make news; they just can’t make facts out of lies.

Visit Shiloh Musings.

America’s favorite serious Jewish actor for much of the 1960′s and ’70′s, Dustin Hoffman, is about to present an award to a filmmaker at an event put on by the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

The recipient of the award is a professional Israel hater, and MPAC is led by someone who publicly suggested Israel was to blame for 9/11 and who advocates for the removal of Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the American terrorism list.  With Jews like Dustin Hoffman, who needs enemies?

This Saturday, April 27, Dustin Hoffman will appear at MPAC’s Media Award Gala in Los Angeles to present MPAC’s Media Award to the anti-Israel film “5 Broken Cameras.”  According to MPAC, Hoffman is a “supporter of the documentary.”

The objective of  “5 Broken Cameras,” like that of so many Pallywood videos, is to portray Arabs as the innocent victims of the rapacious Israel.  This movie began as video clips of the protests that were submitted as “evidence” to Israeli courts and handed over to be used by mainstream media to show the sad plight of the Arabs.  The videos which then became this movie were taken and put together by someone participating on one side of a propaganda war, and not by an objective film maker seeking to document reality – as is the role of documentaries – that fact should have sounded alarm bells for a professional actor of Hoffman’s stature.

In his very first film, “The Graduate,” (1967), Hoffman played a recent college graduate whose parents expect him to do great things, but who was stuck in an emotional and motivational dead zone.  His character, Benjamin Braddock, is turned off by the plastic values of his parents’ generation, but has no passion or interests to replace them.  And so he is portrayed floating in his parents’ swimming pool, suspended below the water, cocooned in indifference, pondering the bizarre lecture given to him by a family friend about “plastics.”

Over the course of his career, Hoffman’s extraordinary roles included the disabled homeless vet Ratzo Rizzo, in “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), the highly talented yet self-destructive break-through comedian Lenny Bruce in “Lenny” (1974).  Hoffman won an Oscar for portraying a newly divorced father painfully attempting to know his young son in “Kramer v. Kramer” (1979), and was nominated for an Oscar for playing the opportunistically gender-bending actor/actress title role in “Tootsie!” (1982).

Hoffman’s stature as a great actor continued into the late 1980′s – he was riveting as an autistic man, Raymond Babbit, in “Rain Main,” for which he won his second Oscar (1988).  Hoffman’s movie roles have become more sporadic and less artistically and financially successful in recent years.

Perhaps that explains why he was willing to be used as the latest in a long series of Jewish “fig leaves,” for anti-Israel projects.  There seems to be no other reason why the Muslim Public Affairs Council would call upon Hoffman to present an award for a documentary film which portrays Israel in the worst possible light, with no balance or nuance.

Hoffman has never been involved in Middle East issues or interests – other than co-starring in a disastrous film set in Morocco. “Ishtar” (1987) was described in London’s Time Out as “so bad it could almost have been deliberate.”

There had been a rumor – which caught fire and remains rampant on the Internet – that Hoffman snubbed Israel and pulled out of appearing at a Jerusalem Film Festival in 2010 in the wake of the Gaza flotilla incident. However, Yigal Molad Hayo, the associate director of the Cinematheque at which the festival takes place, was quoted in an article in the Jewish Chronicle that the account had not been accurate, and the discussions with Hoffman had not progressed even before the Mavi Marmara incident.

It isn’t hard to imagine why the Muslim Public Affairs Council would want a famous Jewish actor to give them the kosher certification of acceptability (“Dustin Hoffman, the famous Jewish actor, hangs out with us, we must be fine” is the not-so-subtle message). But why would Hoffman agree to participate?

Hoffman is someone whose Jewishness seems to have played very little role in his life other than as a trigger to anti-Semitic bullies, and the fact that his height, his nose, his nasal voice and his plucky, outsider roles are all stereotypically Jewish.  Hoffman recently spoke about the complete absence of anything Jewish in his life growing up.  He did not become a bar mitzvah and he never learned any Hebrew.

The photo above appears in the Facebook group “I acknowledge Apartheid Exists”

So why am I posting it? Because it’s typical Palestinian lies and nonsense.

They hijacked a photo from 2005, which had the original caption:

Title: Religious Jews Protest Against The Desecration Of Ancient Graves

Caption: KIBBUTZ REGAVIM, ISRAEL – MAY 31: An Israeli security guard grabs an ultra-Orthodox Jew in a headlock during a protest against the desecration of alleged ancient Jewish graves May 31, 2005 near Kibbutz Regavim in northern Israel.

Dozens of black-garbed religious Jews clashed with the privately-hired guards as they tried to prevent the construction of the Trans-Israel highway over the graves. The protesters say the graves are Jewish, but archaeologists say they are Roman and date to the late second and early third century AD.

(Photo by David Silverman/Getty Images)

Date created: 31 May 2005

Editorial image #: 53001697

But why should we let facts get in the way of typical Palestinian lies?

P.S.: The photo itself is distressing, yet its slanderous for Palestinians to hijack it and call it as their own.